Welcome to Our Blog

We're TubaDad (laid-back taco-eating tuba-player from Texas) and M3 (excitable, artsy chocoholic from California). We adopted our beautiful twin girls from Hubei, China in Oct 2006 and this blog is about our lives with the twinados, Ro and Ree. Cheers!

Contact Us

Blog Archive

Search this Blog

Friday, June 15, 2007

Do you know what Roseola is? Yeah I didn't either. But I do now...
While TubaDad was on a business trip this week, I was battling the twins' slight head colds, which then turned into freaky high fevers and the runs. At one point Ro's fever reached 105 and nearly gave me a heart attack. I almost broke my leg trying to simultaneously rush Ro upstairs into a tepid bath while dialing the pediatrician, while carrying Ree, while loading Tylenol into the dropper.
In any case, the fevers broke and I celebrated that we were home free, until Miss Ro came down with a weird rash on her torso this afternoon. Huh?! After conferring with the pediatrician, apparently she has Roseola (not Rosacea as I first thought the doctor said). It's not awful, apparently is pretty common in kids aged 6 mos to 3 yrs, and is usually, though not always, characterized by:

scary-high fevers

irritability

slight upper respiratory infections

and a telltale rash after everything else is gone

Well shoot, good to know what they had/have. Ree probably had the same thing, since she had a moderate fever, she just never developed bad symptoms. (She seems to shrug off illnesses while Ro gets hit harder.)
If your kiddo gets this really common childhood illness, your doctor's office probably won't even want to see you. They'll most likely tell you to watch/treat the high fever carefully and later give Benadryl for the rash. All of the research I did on Roseola is kind of conflicting, by the way. According to Dr. Google (heh), the incubation period can be anywhere from 5 to 15 days and kids are either contagious while they have a fever or while they have the rash. Hmm. I guess we'll lock down the house in quarantine mode at least until the rash is gone. (And sorry again to Donna for exposing your girls yesterday at the pool. I was just so excited that they had kicked the fevers and thought we were done. No idea this sneaky Roseola rash was lurking around the corner...)
Don't want to leave everyone on a downer note, so here's my favorite picture from the backyard yesterday. The girls were playing in their water table and I swear from the look on their faces they're saying "Who us? Noooooo mama, we weren't drinking the water!"
Little cuties! Still smiling and playing, even while fighting off some weird illness I'd never heard of before today.
PS: If you still need a Father's Day gift for the dad who has everything under the sun, why not make a donation in his name to one of your favorite charities like these that support children? We love Grace & Hope for Children, Love without Boundaries, and Half the Sky. It'll probably make him smile a whole lot more than another new tie or the latest gimmicky laser tool from Home Depot, and you won't have to suffer one more minute of last-minute shopper's angst. :-)

Foster Care

Want to make a big difference in the world? Give one small child the benefit of Foster Care. Ro and Ree were in foster care and it changed their lives. Read more about it or read about other charities that help children.